Topics - scourge

(Reuters) - For sure it's just what Nelson Mandela would have wanted, but does it amount to more than that?

The historic handshake between U.S. President Barack Obama and Cuba's Raul Castro at a memorial for Mandela on Tuesday in Johannesburg was greeted on the streets of Cuba with surprise and hopes of improved relations.

Reaction was more muted in Miami, where Cuban exiles have had a hard time accepting Mandela's respect for Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

We've forgotten the one way flow out of Cuba or west away from the Berlin wall. Red fell out of fashion for a while but then know nothing generations y and omega came along to make communism trendy yet again.

Rep. Duncan Hunter, a California Republican on the Armed Services Committee, sent letters to House committee chairmen and the Army secretary urging them to cut funding to the Human Terrain System and shut it down. The program, begun during the height of the counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, had documented cases of fraud, racism and sexual harassment dating to 2010, a USA TODAY investigation found earlier this year.

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Former and current team members told Army investigators and the paper, on condition of anonymity, that they regularly claimed hours they didn't work, taking home more than $200,000 a year and months of comp time for little or no work. The Army's investigation showed some members were paid salaries topping $280,000 and also given six months paid leave upon returning home.

Samantha Scheibe claimed Zimmerman had smashed a glass table, threatened her with a shotgun and ultimately pushed her out of the house she rented.

Scheibe told deputies the ordeal started with a verbal argument and that she asked Zimmerman to leave the house. Her account in the arrest report says he began packing his belongings, including a shotgun and an assault rifle. She says she began putting his things in the living room and outside the house, and he became upset. At that point, the report says, he took the shotgun out of its case.

It doesn't make sense to have a neighborhood watchman whos sole means of response is a pistol. No wonder people didn't want the guy on patrol and the initial incident turned into an ugly fiasco.

A professional understands escalated response and has the training for each stage. Unarmed combat for fist fighting, a baton for melee and a firearm for shooting. Most importantly he has the means to first report potential trouble via phone or radio.

Pity poor Antarctica: already shedding its land (but not its sea) ice, it's now been found to conceal a volcano of some considerable size beneath its frosty coating.

Like a nicotine addict making a desperate attempt to hide in an airline toilet, this smoker had itself hidden – but instead of a couple of centimetres of door, its presence was concealed underneath the glaciers in the vicinity of Mount Sidley.

Astronomers have now found the signature of heavy particles moving at two-thirds the speed of light in the jet from a stellar-mass black hole candidate. María Díaz Trigo and colleagues monitored the X-ray and radio emissions from a binary system thought to contain a black hole and found strong emission most consistent with highly ionized iron atoms accelerated to high velocity. Since this system is typical of other black holes in the Milky Way, this new observation indicates that similar systems are likely to all blast protons and nuclei into the surrounding space.

What are we really best at anymore? Financial and intellectual fraud, shopping, and narcissism are at the top.

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New York's World Trade Center has been crowned the tallest building in the nation. That's fourth when ranked among the world's tallest skyscrapers.

I wanted to write "only" fourth in the world. Because when you start to compare our tallest with the tallest around the world -- and with one particular sky-scraping building in the works -- it's hard not to feel puny.

“We,” Westerners with a rescue mentality, will never solve “their” problems. As I write this, the country is being rocked with a national scandal the newspapers are calling “Cashgate.” High public officials and politicians have siphoned into the national treasury and the country is broke. The country’s health care system, always threadbare at best, has collapsed. Donors – 40% of the government budget – have suspended their donations.

I just read where a mid – sized church in the central United States had a one-day event in which church members put on plastic gloves and caps and spent all day packing food for hungry children overseas. One problem I have with this is the statistics I read. Out of 7.1 billion people in the world, 870 million, or about one out of eight, suffers from chronic hunger. In Africa, the stats are even grimmer: nearly one out of four. Africa in recent years was making modest progress, but since 2007 the number of hungry in Africa has increased about 2 percent per year. Sending care packages abroad has marginal impact, because people have to eat 365 days a year, and no church anywhere has the resources to meet the need (870 million X 3 meals a day = 2,610,000,000 meals – every day).

For a given region, carrying capacity is the maximum number of individuals of a given species that an area's resources can sustain indefinitely without significantly depleting or degrading those resources. Determining the carrying capacities for most organisms is fairly straightforward.

The three men — David Hall, Glenn Taylor and his son — were busted after they posted video of themselves toppling the 200 million-year-old rock at Goblin Valley State Park last week. Authorities are considering charging the three men, all Boy Scouts leaders, with felony crimes.

In 2012, the cost of diabetes totaled $245 billion in the U.S. alone, he says. "In 2007, the cost was $174 billion, so in only five years, there has been a 43% increase in the cost of caring for diabetes. The increased cost is driven by the epidemic numbers of people with the disease."

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Physical activity is important because it improves the body's ability to utilize insulin, so a regular exercise program makes a person more insulin sensitive -- their body responds to the insulin they make more effectively, Ratner says.

Legendary underground death metal and black metal illustrator Chris Moyen releases his book Chris Moyen’s Thorncross: Black Ink & Metal this week on Nuclear War Now! Productions. The book will be a foot-square compilation of the artist’s work.

The 34-year-old Connecticut woman who was shot and killed by police after a harrowing high-speed chase from the White House to Capitol Hill suffered from post-partum depression, her mother told ABC News.

Miriam Carey, a dental hygienist from Stamford, Conn., was identified as the driver of the black luxury sedan that first rammed a barrier at the White House, then sped to Capitol Hill, defying attempts by armed police to stop her Thursday afternoon. She was shot and killed fleeing her car near the Hart Senate Office Building

WASHINGTON (RNS) In the most comprehensive study of American Jews in 12 years, a strong majority said being Jewish is mostly about ancestry or culture, not the religious practice of Judaism.

"A Portrait of Jewish Americans," released Tuesday (Oct. 1) by the Pew Research Center, shows strong secularist trends most clearly seen in one finding: 62% of U.S. Jews said Jewishness is largely about culture or ancestry; just 15% said it's about religious belief.

"Non-Jews may be stunned by it," said Alan Cooperman, co-author of the study. "Being Jewish to most Jews in America today is not a matter of religion."

Washington marched relentlessly toward its first federal shutdown in 17 years Saturday after House Speaker John A. Boehner yielded to conservative demands to use a government-funding bill to press an attack on President Obama’s 2010 health-care law.

Early Sunday morning, the House approved a plan to keep the government open past midnight Monday. But under pressure from Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) and other GOP hard-liners, Boehner (R-Ohio) agreed to amend the bill to include a one-year delay of the health law’s mandates, taxes and benefits — ensuring a stalemate with the Democratic Senate.

They say the attack on Obamacare will hurt Republicans. I say it has potential long term benefits for American conservatives.

The health care reform law is designed to shift costs to young, healthy, responsible Americans to benefit all of those who are otherwise. That can end up turning these best Americans against the law that is sucking the life out of them and into the arms of the Republican party that has taken a stand against this new strain of socialism.

(WASHINGTON) -- The shadowy National Security Agency has revealed that a small number of the agency’s employees used their vast international surveillance powers -- meant to track potential terrorists and protect the American homeland -- to check up on their crushes or significant others.

In nearly a dozen incidents over the last decade, NSA employees broke NSA rules to enter phone numbers or email addresses associated with their romantic interests, in one case an ex, into vast databases to see to whom they were talking, according to the agency’s Inspector General.